A Sensible Default is a practice that, absent some overriding context, should be used when carrying out a certain kind of task. In software development such sensible defaults might include things like “use version control”, “separate UI logic from domain logic”, “automate deployment pipelines”. The term “sensible default” is a deliberate contrast to “best practice”. Folks dislike calling things “best practice” because that term implies a general presumption...

The simdjson library is a C++ library to parse and generate JSON. It is used in Node.js, ClickHouse, Meta Velox, StarRocks, Apache Doris, the Ladybird browser and many other systems. We released version 4.0 a year ago, in September 2025. Its headline feature was C++26 static reflection: you could turn a C++ structure into JSON, and back, without writing any glue code. Today we are releasing version 5.0. Static reflection is no longer guarded and is an officially supported feature. When...

The twenty-first episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 21, I chat with Joel , the author of joelchrono.xyz about, among other things, writing about video games, weeknotes, homepage and website design, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Joel joelchrono.xyz The twenty-first episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving also ...

Over the past few years, I spent way more time than I probably should have thinking about my life. And the way I usually look at it is by asking two fundamental questions. The first question is “do I want to have a life?”. You might think this is a silly question to even ask, but since I was a teen I’ve always had a weird relationship with the concept of death, and as a result of that, the whole idea of being alive at all has never been an absolute certainty. Which is why I periodically ...

The Quay, Olaveaga, Bilbao by Luis Paret y Alcazar, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at ASML’s lack of European sales, a California distributed power plant, Starlink as a planetary barometer, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but a more involved piece about how the AI that power...

It’s common to compare the current AI takeover of software engineering to the rise of AI in chess. Chess AIs went from much weaker than serious players to much stronger than even the strongest humans. Between those points, there was a middle period dominated by “centaurs”: human-AI partnerships that were stronger than unassisted AIs or humans. Lots of people think that we’re currently in a world of software engineering centaurs. According to them, coding AIs are not yet capable enough to...

Like many programmers, I find Alexis King's Parse, don't validate article fascinating, because it gives a name to an idiom that seems familiar and important - one I've observed and used in the past without naming it explicitly. This post is a review of the "Parse, don't validate" pattern applied to the Rust programming language (the original post uses Haskell). I was particularly interested in finding educational examples of this pattern in the Rust standard library and other well-known projec...

Travellers & Tinkers, CC BY-SA 4.0 I Look, if you are still stuck on “AI cannot really think, it’s just a stochastic parrot”, please snap out of it and lock in, or you’ll keep repeating that line until you find yourself sitting in the corner chair, watching as ChatGPT™ has sex with your wife. If you’ve paid attention to the HuggingFace hacking scandal and to what’s going on in mathematics , we’re well past the “stochastic parrot”, and have entered a world in wh...

Gamification started as a marketing word and quietly became infrastructure. Points, streaks, levels and leaderboards now sit underneath activities that have nothing to do with play, and most people interact with several of these systems daily without registering any of them as games. Some of the conversions are inspired. Some are transparent attempts to make a chore feel like an achievement. All of them work on the same handful of mechanics, which is the interesting part. Here are eig...

PORTSMOUTH, U.K. (September 28, 2026) – Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, and Kraken Technology Group Ltd., a world-leading autonomous maritime company, announced today the successful demonstration of autonomous maritime teaming of Kraken’s high-performance, modular K3 SCOUT uncrewed surface vessel (USV) with the Hivemind AI pilot, Shield AI’s mission autonomy software. The joint demonstration in Portsmouth, U.K. showcas...

This has been the year for weddings. Clara and I (finally) tied the knot earlier this year after being together for more than a decade, and we have three more for friends and family later this year. Yesterday we were honoured to be at the Gunner’s Barracks in Sydney again for another, this time between Linh and my brother-in-law Victor. A bit of rain threatened to wash away the initial ceremony, but everyone laughed and the bride and groom took it in their stride. It’s also a good luck o...

Our Moon as imaged by the Galileo spacecraft flying past it on December 7, 1992. Image: NASA Many people think that the Moon is just a gray ball of rock in our sky. Surprisingly, many scientists seem to share this notion. I once had a physicist tell me the Moon is scientifically boring. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. So I wrote this article to summarize the immense scientific and exploratory value of Earth’s cosmic companion. Firstly, consider that the bootprints of Apollo astrona...

The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... Read More The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... Read More The bet to deliver autonomous vehicles to the masses.  ... ... Read More Read More

Yesterday, I received this email as a response to You Can't Vibe Code Love . It's such a remarkable and powerful statement that I asked permission to share it here, in its entirety, with personal information redacted: Hey Jeff, Hope you and your family are doing well. Just jogging your memory; I reached out to you (and John Carmack) about how difficult interviewing had become despite me being a stellar engineer at my work. You offered some words of wisdom, wrote me a postcard, which I still hav...

I've been working on my homelab for years, and I enjoy sharing what I learn through this blog and my YouTube channel. Over the past few years, I realized the homelab community (which isn't really a defined thing—that's okay) hasn't had its own gathering, the way makers, software engineers, embedded developers, and HPC professionals do. There are many events that have crossover into the homelab realm, but nothing focused on energy-efficient servers, privacy-respecting self-hosted softw...

By Dhruv Pratap Introduction Organizations that have been around for a while usually run two identity systems side by side. One belongs to the cloud provider: IAM roles, instance profiles, execution roles. The other is your own, and it is the one your internal services actually check when they decide whether to answer a request. On infrastructure you build yourself, you can bootstrap your own identity however you like. On managed compute you cannot. The provider hands your process a cloud ide...

The late Ronald Graham wore two hats. He was a renowned mathematician, at one time president of the American Mathematical Society. He was also a serious juggler, and president of the International Jugglers’ Association. “He loved tricks,” said Fan Chung, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego, who was married to Graham. “You know, spinning a ball, spinning a coat hanger… Source The late Ronald Graham wore two hats. He was a renowned mathematician, at one time pre...

On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube ; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the talk. And as an annotated presentation : # I'm going to give a lightning tour of everything that has happened so far in 2026. The year isn't over yet! # ...

Listen I understand that technically I am capable of wearing a sweater at anytime but that’s not what I mean and you know it I can’t wear a sweater right this minute because it’s the hottest part of the day and the hottest part of the day is still a little too hot for sweater. But morning? Evening? SWEATER TIME.  Also I’ve never really thought about the word sweater before and is it the word we used because this is an item of clothing that makes you sweat, hypotheti...

The STOC conference (and likely others) are requiring that a submission says how much AI was used. I can imagine the following options: 1) AI was used for proofreading and tightening prose (I think in this case you do not need to disclose). 2) AI was used to shorten the proofs. 3) I came up with the questions but AI supplied all of the answers.  However, I have read it and take responsibility for the content. 4) AI came up with the questions and AI supplied all of the answers.  However, I have...

Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off again. I don’t know much about electronics, but I’ve been curious about whether it’s possible to fix old electronics for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect repair project because I might...

I hope you're not tired of the 8087, because I have another article about Intel's floating-point chip. 1 In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, making floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. In this article, I look at the algorithm behind the chip's tangent instruction. One popular approach for trigonometric functions is an algorithm called CORDIC. Another approach is a polynomial approximation. The 8087 combined the two to obtain both high accuracy and high performa...

Hello, we have very unusual Friday facts for you. Journey to the physical world Pard It all started in the hot summer of 2024 when we worked really hard to finish the Space Age DLC. The game was almost ready, but we wanted some feedback from our players. A decision was made to organise a playtesting event ( FFF-427 ), where teams of players could play the game from start to finish and provide us with in-person feedback and criticism to deliver the best product you a...